Boxing 1 Bard + 5 Mages or 1 Bard + 5 Beastlords... possibly 1 Bard + 5 Necros? I've always wanted to try out something like this and see how far I can take it, was going to start up one over this weekend.
What server? None of those sound remotely fun on Truebox, too much micromanagement on healing and no rez when you screw up. The necros might be viable on Ragefire/Lockjaw.
Actually a bard with five air pets would rock in many situations, as long you are in GoD+ era and get Pet Affinity AA (merged now into the Companion Suspension line, rank III iirc). But don't expect boxing Tipt ;-)
Yeah that was what I was definitely leaning towards with the airpets in mind. My gut feeling tells me that I should drop a mage and add a druid but then something just sounds so much more appealing when you say 5 mages vs 4 mages.
To be honest, the first box I made once back on progression servers was a druid, as I quickly understood I needed some healing and transport in classic era to have a minimum of autonomy and survivability (and snare, so important actually...). But if the idea is to heal the pets, a cleric with group heals (again, works only in GoD+ era as it requires Pet Affinity) would be the most efficient to heal several pets at once. You could also rotate Pet Stop on each pet to regenerate them in turns, but that won't be enough on mobs with very hard dps or aoes without external healing. Bard + Cleric + 4 air pets sounds very fine too imho
I toyed around with 5 mages and a bard box...it's a solid setup, but it's effectiveness varies by situation. 5 mages typically means they are going to be very fragile. It's hard to keep spells up on 5 characters, let alone their defense and armor. If I had a well established camp with no surprise roamers, it worked pretty well. Unfortunately, after about 30 minutes usually, a mage would grab aggro somehow and get vaporized. Not having a cleric was annoying in this situation. I was able to dominate an entire wing of Seb with this setup when my group was around 55, but I was more effective with my "actual" 6-box group (Monk / Bard / Mage / Ench / Clr / Dru). Being able to AoE aggro with the bard and use HoT's to heal him without generating cleric aggro proved to be awesome. I also made a group of 4 necros (no bard), and that was pretty cool, but their pets are just garbage. The combined brittleness of pets and time it took to burn mobs down with DOTs just wasn't all that efficient. Never tried the beastlord crew, but I can't imagine that being better than mages.
